Computation lies at the heart of understanding all systems. CSAIL studies this vast, compelling field to unlock the secrets of intelligence, extend the power of machines, and explore human/machine interactions.

Here’s one way to get kids excited about programming: a "robot garden" with dozens of fast-changing LED lights and more than 100 origami robots that can crawl, swim, and blossom like flowers. Read more.

When MIT senior Sheldon Trotman walks into any room, he almost instinctively looks for inefficiencies. The electrical engineering and computer science major is bent on streamlining our world, and has already founded several small companies that aim to do so. Read more.

Mapping the human genome, accomplished a decade ago, was heralded for laying the foundation for understanding genetic variation and links to a wide range of diseases. But genes can be switched on and off by many chemical modifications, aka "epigenetic marks." Now Manolis Kellis, EECS professor and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Broad Institute has led an NIH group that has created a similar map of the human epigenome. This work will lead to a global map towards understanding fundamental developmental and disease processes in humans. Read more.

Our susceptibility to disease depends both on the genes that we inherit from our parents and on our lifetime experiences. These two components — nature and nurture — seem to affect very different processes in the context of Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study published today in the journal Nature. Read more.

In the quest for improving the speed and efficiency of multicore chips, EECS Assistant Professor Daniel Sanchez and graduate student Nathan Beckmann designed a system that moves data around multicore chips' memory banks — improving execution by 18 percent on average while increasing energy efficiency as well. They won an award for this work in 2013. Now.. Read more.

Professor Rob Miller and members of the User Interface Design Group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have devised a system that uses crowd-sourcing to annotate instructional videos for improved learning. Read more.

Five members of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of a total of eight MIT faculty have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering including Hari Balakrishnan, Sangeeta Bhatia, Anantha Chandrakasan, L. Rafael Reif and Daniela Rus. Read more.

In building multicore chips, a common inefficiency arises with the addition of more than eight cores. EECS professor Nir Shavit, principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), a former student now at Microsoft Research and several EECS graduate students have analyzed data structures called priority codes and dodged logjams using skip code. Read more.

In a paper appearing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Robotics Research, Professors and member of the Learning and Intelligent Systems Group Leslie Kaelbling and Tomas Lozano Perez and EECS graduate student Lawson Wong show that a system using an off-the-shelf algorithm to aggregate different perspectives can recognize four times as many objects as one that uses a single perspective, while reducing the number of misidentifications. Read more.

A record number of Fellow selections from any single institution marks the election by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) of five CSAIL researchers and members of the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department to ACM 2014 Fellow. The ACM has cited Srini Devadas, Eric Grimson, Robert Morris, Ronitt Rubinfeld and Daniela Rus for "providing key knowledge" to computing.

Adam Chilpala, principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the Douglas Ross Career Development Professor of Software Technology has developed a new programming language called Ur/Web that promises to take the drudgery out of Web development. Read more.

CSAIL postdoc and member of the MIT Computational Biology Group, Andreas Pfenning and collaborators at Duke University have reported findings on large data studies comparing song bird genomics with humans and primates. Vocal-learning birds and primates have common genes that could help pinpoint genetic disorders in humans such as stuttering or Huntington's Disease. Read more.

On Dec. 11, 2014, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab hosted 150 local students for its first annual “Hour of Code” demo fair, tied to the international initiative aimed at getting young people excited about programming. Read more.

A new cybersecurity center made possible by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will focus on cyber security policy -- one of three new academic initiatives (also at Stanford and UC Berkeley) aimed at laying the foundations for smart, sustainable policy to deal with the growing global cyber threats. Read more.

At this year’s Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) conference, EECS faculty member Martin Rinard and several students from his group in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory presented a new system that lets programmers identify sections of their code that can tolerate inconsequential error. The system, dubbed Chisel, then determines which program instructions to assign to unreliable hardware components, to maximize energy savings yet still meet the programmers’ accuracy requirements. Read more.

Rodney Brooks, Founder, Chairman, CTO of Rethink Robotics and Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT, has spent his life creating intelligent machines that do our bidding. Read more about him and why he fears there will not be enough workforce robots in the future.

Using Bayesian regression, Devavrat Shah, member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (LIDS) and recent graduate student Kang Zhang have identified patterns from five months of price data from all major Bitcoin exhanges — enabling them to predict the price of Bitcoin — thereby allowing them to double their investment over a 50 day period. Read more.

Three 2014-2015 Faculty Research Innovation Fellowships (FRIF) were announced on Oct. 7. 2014. The FRIF was established in 2011 to recognize mid-career EECS faculty members for outstanding research contributions and international leadership in their fields. Read more.

Li-Shiuan Peh, professor of electrical engineering and computer science in the EECS Department at MIT has teamed to develop a new system that directs drivers using GPS to avoid traffic congestion. The work won the group one of the best-paper awards at the Intelligent Transportation Systems World Congress last week. Read more.

Getting to the source of data-visualization aberrations is a big problem in big data. EECS doctoral student Eugene Wu with Sam Madden, professor of computer science and engineering in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have released a new tool, called DBWipes, that pinpoints aberrations and determines which data sources to investigate. Read more.

A team led by Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) researchers including EECS associate professor Wojciech Matusik and project lead and doctoral candidate Adriana Schulz has developed “Fab By Example,” the first data-driven method to help people design products, with a growing database of templates that allow users to customize thousands of complex items — without the need to understand the mechanical engineering that might normally be expected. The team will be presenting its system at this month’s Siggraph graphics conference. Read more.

Researchers at MIT -- including EECS graduate student Abe Davis and EECS faculty members Fredo Durand and Bill Freeman, and members of the Computer Graphics Group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have collaborated with colleagues at Microsoft and Adobe to develop an algorithm to reconstruct an audio signal produced by practically invisible vibrations of objects filmed in video and normally inaudible to human hearing. Read more.

Paying attention to the data that says MOOC learning is limited because of high drop rates and other negatives, CSAIL researchers have noted that students need help learning how to watch the videos and these researchers have developed a new way for students to learn how to watch MOOC videos called LectureScape. Read more.